The 21 greatest teen movies

Robbie Collin11 May 2015 • 2:29pm

Mods, rebels and mean girls star in the finest teen movies ever made

Though it’s been around as a film genre since the early 1950s, the teen movie just doesn’t get old. Films about youthful rebellion and sexual awakening are fascinating whatever your age – and below, I’ve listed my 21 favourites, which I’m sure I’ll keep re-watching and re-discovering for as long as I live.

They’re drawn from across various eras and cultures, but all of them brilliantly describe that vertiginous lurch we all feel when we find ourselves teetering on the brink of adulthood. “Life moves pretty fast,” a wise man once said: “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” That’s exactly what the best films allow us to do.

Teenage rebellion could be seen in cinemas long before the idea of the teenager had really taken shape: as early as 1937, William Wyler’s Dead End showed New York slum kids railing against their older, richer neighbours. But it took Marlon Brando straddling a 6T Triumph Thunderbird to give teen rebelliousness its first icon.

Brando was 29 years old when he starred in Laslo Benedek’s biker drama, but he came to embody the cool disaffectedness of this new emerging social group. When a girl asked Johnny Strabler what he was rebelling against, his answer – “Whaddaya got?” – went down in film history. That question became the keystone of every great teen movie since.

2. Summer with Monika (1953)

A still from Summer with Monika (1953)Credit:
Moviestore Collection / Rex Features

America supplied the violence, but Europe brought the sex. In Ingmar Bergman’s charged drama, two teenagers abscond on a boat and drift around Sweden’s Baltic coast, until autumn and adulthood call. The film’s sexual frankness, including a scene in which the actress Harriet Andersson clambers naked across a rocky shore, made it a sizeable word-of-mouth hit

3. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)Credit:
Rex Features

The early death of its star, James Dean, secured instant-legend status for Nicholas Ray’s brooding melodrama, in which Jim Stark, the new boy at Dawson High School, clashes with bullies, turns on his parents, and tries to build a new family from friendship.

When Rebel Without a Cause was released in the United States, Dean had died less than a month previously, and Elvis Presley’s first sessions with RCA in Nashville were only six months away. The film appeared at a fold in American history, with the cult of the teenager writ large on the pages ahead.

4. Cruel Story of Youth (AKA Naked Youth)(1960)

On the other side of the world, things weren’t so different. Japan’s teen movies described the hormone-addled rise of that country’s own youth, who’d been stung by the recent Allied occupation and were hungry for freedoms of every type. In 1960, Nagisa Oshima shocked international audiences with this sexually charged drama slathered in French New Wave cool, about a high-school girl (Miyuki Kuwano) who falls into an intense relationship with a rebellious student.

5. Il Posto (1961)

Meanwhile, in Italy: Domenico, a 19-year-old from rural Lombardy, comes to Milan to find work as an office messenger, although the pressures and routines of adulthood soon start to grind him down. Unlike America and Japan’s teenage mythmaking, Ermanno Olmi’s film was scrupulously grounded in the real world: this was the teen movie via neorealism – tender, smart and bleakly beautiful.

6. A Hard Day's Night (1964)

The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night (1964)Credit:
Alamy

The first of The Beatles’ five films, and their best by far, caught hold of the sparky exuberance of teen culture: it’s the first title on this list in which being a teenager looks straightforwardly fun. Richard Lester’s film swerved between documentary, rock musical and surreal comedy – but when you’re young and free, why tie yourself down?

7. Murmur of the Heart (1971)

A scene from Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart (1971)Credit:
Alamy

Being a 14-year-old boy in France of the early Seventies was a heck of a ride: it meant brothels, cigars, brandy, jazz and Proust, if Louis Malle’s coming-of-age tale, made in the wake of the New Wave, is anything to go by. (And you really hope it is.) A scene of maternal incest made the film controversial on release, but audiences bracing for scandal were surprised by its lightness and subtlety.

8. American Graffiti (1973)

George Lucas's second film was the coming-of-age drama American Graffiti (1973)Credit:
Rex Features

George Lucas’s second feature was a Kennedy film for a Nixon crowd. Set in 1962, it commemorated, and celebrated, a time to be young that had already passed – before rioting, assassinations and ground war in Vietnam took their toll on the American psyche. It’s simple stuff: the adventures of four teenage friends during one summer night. Time for fun is short, but they, and the world, don’t know it yet.

Franc Roddam’s glowering Mod drama, freely adapted from The Who’s rock opera, is about the illusion of invincibility: the sense of strength that flows through you when you’re young and part of the right crowd; wearing the right clothes, thinking the right thoughts, revving the right Vespa. The scene is unmistakably London and Brighton, 1964, but the needs and fears the film gives voice to feel startlingly true even now.

10. Gregory's Girl (1981)

Dee Hepburn is the object of John Gordon Sinclair's affection in 'Gregory's Girl' (1981)Credit:
Alamy

Bill Forsyth’s irresistible comic romance, set mostly in a secondary school just outside Glasgow, appears slight at first, but there’s a bone-deep awareness of the agonies and joys of teenage life here, and the comedy, though gentle, is alpine-crisp. John Gordon Sinclair’s storkish physique is teen awkwardness given form, and you cringe along with every stumble and flub.

11. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Sean Penn as Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)Credit:
Alamy

The early Eighties was when Hollywood really seized on the teen movie as a marketable commodity, and Amy Heckerling’s film, adapted by Cameron Crowe from his own book, is the smartest and sharpest of the era. At the time, critics despaired at its earthy humour and unglamorous sex, but the film had a chord-striking honesty that couldn’t be found in Porky’s and its imitators, and Crowe’s dialogue snaps like mousetraps.

12. Pauline at the Beach (1983)

Eric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach (1983)Credit:
Ronald Grant Archive

It’s hard to think of a director whose teenage characters are blessed with more early-blossoming wisdom than Éric Rohmer. In the third film from his Comedies and Proverbs series, 15-year-old Pauline (Amanda Langlet) passes the summer at a small town on the coast, discovering love while watching the intricate farce of her elders’ romantic lives unravel

13. The Breakfast Club (1985)

The Breakfast ClubCredit:
Rex

How on earth do you choose just a single to put on a list like this? The answer is you don’t, so here’s the first of two: the writer-director’s inspired 1985 chamber-piece, in which five apparent stock-character teens – a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal, as they’re introduced to us – discover there’s more to being young than living up to the role with which you’ve been labelled.

14. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

Matthew Broderick in the John Hughes classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)Credit:
Alamy

Every word of The Breakfast Club rang, and still rings, heart-twistingly true. But a year later, Hughes showed he could make a fantasy story seem every bit as plausible. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is set over a day of virtuoso high-school truancy, involving a stolen Ferrari, a parade, a haute cuisine lunch and a baseball game. But underpinning the craziness is a sense of the bittersweet quickness of teenage life – Ferris reminds us these days don’t just have to be endured, but seized.

In the South Central Los Angeles of John Singleton’s blistering debut feature, coming of age isn’t a given. Three teenage boys plan their futures while doing their best to survive in the present: their choices could lead them to college, via a sports scholarship, or a life of street hustling, or a fast and brutal end. Family bonds strain and loyalties are tested. It’s a landmark of American cinema: young voices, long-ignored, were suddenly speaking out.

16. Dazed and Confused (1993)

It’s 1976 in Austin, Texas, on the last day of school, although the future seems a lifetime away. Richard Linklater’s film is about preserving a moment in time, even if what happens in that moment is almightily inconsequential: parties, pranks, twiddly vignettes of romance and friendship. The film flows as naturally as life, and every second rings slyly true

Amy Heckerling again, who relocated from Ridgemont High to Beverly Hills for this fizzy satire loosely based on Jane Austen’s Emma, in which 15-year-old queen bee Cher (Alicia Silverstone) gets a taste for good deeds after engineering a romance between two teachers. Like Ridgemont, Clueless helped to jump-start a golden age of American teen movies, and beneath its fluffy, fashion-crazed surface, there’s needle-sharp wit

18. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)Credit:
Touchstone Pictures

Another teen reimagining of a literary classic; this time, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, relocated to Padua High School, where Julia Stiles’s proud outsider is wooed by Heath Ledger’s hunky scruff. The title change is significant: Stiles doesn’t play a shrew but an unabashed feminist, who reads The Bell Jar at home to counteract the “oppressive patriarchal values of the classroom”. Even 15 years later, she’s almost alone in the genre.

19. Battle Royale (2000)

Teens fight to the death in Battle Royale (2000)Credit:
Rex Features

With the Hunger Games films and now Divergent, teen films are branching out into bolder, dystopian territory, but the move was anticipated by Kinji Fukasaku’s astonishing, blood-dark satire in which schoolchildren are shanghaied into a state-sponsored fight to the death. Crazy and provocative, yet totally morally serious; it’s hard to imagine Fukasaku’s last film ever being drained of its power to shock.

One of the 20 greatest teen films, sure – and unquestionably the sexiest. In Alfonso Cuarón’s road movie, two 17-year-old chums and a glamorous older woman drive across Mexico in search of a perfect beach; mostly, she’s in the driving seat, in every sense. A voice-over weaves in grim observations about the country’s present state, adding melancholic bite. The film considers death, but shivers with life. It’s young.

In recent years, the smart American teen movie has threatened to make a comeback, with Drew Barrymore’s Whip It and Will Gluck’s Easy A moving the genre in a direction of which you suspect Kat Stratford would approve. But both of those films felt possible thanks to Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey and starring Lindsay Lohan, in which a home-educated ingénue plunges into the high-school jungle. It’s funny, wise, endlessly quotable and so well observed it stings.